The diary of a white girl in Arabia

I knew that I was on the cusp of the winnings. I could feel the winds of victory softly touching my hair and lifting my spirits. Soon, they whispered. I had thought that my gift card was winnings enough. I certainly felt satisfied. My time of waiting had been rewarded and I had returned to the land of luck. Little did I know that it was just the beginning.

Currently, our neighbourhood mall is hosting a game promotion. If you spend a certain dollar amount, you receive a token to play the life sized version of Monopoly with Mr. Monopoly himself! As luck would have it, my gym membership was coming due. The rules stipulate that any money spent in the mall can be used towards the token, and my gym is in the mall! Because it ends up being a better deal to pay a year up front, we ended up getting a lot of tokens! The complication in the whole deal is that you can only claim tokens on the day that you spend the money and the tokens have to be used that day. So, we had a plan. Thankfully, we have two slaves children to enlist into our cause. I didn’t realize that the games began at 12 p.m. If I had known, we would have been there at the crack of start, but instead we started playing at the 3p.m. start time, which wasn’t as advantageous. I did get the tip from another player in line that it is a much better strategy to play at noon because no one is at the mall then, really, so your chances of winning are higher. Alas, we chose the time that we did and we couldn’t go back in time nor could we hold off to the other day.

As it turned out, we won our very first round! Charlie scored us a 500 of our monies gift card, which we quickly commandeered for our family purposes and kept on playing. By the time we got through all the games, it was after 6 p.m. and we were exhausted. I had slipped away for the final game in order to take in a class at the gym.

Our final winning haul was:

- 500 of our monies gift card

- 2 free passes to a child’s play area

- 2 gift cards to an arcade

- 2 20% off vouchers to a store that I’m never going to shop at

- 2 more 20% vouchers to another store that I’m not going to shop at

I think our winnings were pretty good! Lola felt like she won when she a) rolled doubles, earning her a second roll right away, b) got to play with the cat and the puppy tokens and, c) got sent to jail. She tried to act like she was upset about being thrown into jail, but really, she was thrilled!

Tonight we tried our hand at the weekly draw for 5,000 of our monies, but, sadly, our lucky streak didn’t smear it’s way over to the ticket drum. Some guy from India won. Lucky duck.

We can always try again next time! The trick to winning is entering in the first place. You never know when luck will strike.